All posts in category Plutonomy

When I first started covering the very rich, a wealth manager gave me this piece of advice: “The very rich are like the unemployed, except they don’t have the edifying focus of trying to find a job.”

In his new e-book, “Rich Man Poor Man,” the right-leaning comedian Adam Carolla takes the idea even further, making a case that the rich and poor have many things in common.

Of course, many will find Carolla’s analogies between rich and poor highly offensive. Some are also a stretch (both rich and poor “use ladders with wheels,” “wear eye patches,” “keep liquor in a sack” and “use shovels on construction sites.”)

And Carolla is perhaps best known for calling the Occupiers “a bunch of (expletive) self-entitled monsters.” He has been a strong supporter of the wealthy in the current class divide.

But he’s a comedian folks. So here are 7 amusing examples from the e-book:

1 – Outdoor Showers. “Rich Guys Ladies always rinse off in the outdoor shower so “there’s no chance of his wife finding a rogue hair on the shower floor when she gets back from rehab.” Poor guys have no shower, so they use the neighbor’s hose.

The map of the world’s wealth has been turned upside down in recent years. So-called “poor” countries are where the wealth is and so-called “rich” countries just aren’t as rich anymore.

This flip-flopped wealth creation has totally re-drawn the luxury market, wealth management and the world’s millionaire and billionaire ranking.

But it’s also created some fantastic new global terminologies for the nouveaux riche. (“Nouveaux” being, well, old hat).

We have, for instance, the Blingsheviks – the flashier, yacht-fleet-owning cousin to the Russian Oligarch.

We have the Bollygarch, the Indian version of the Oligarch, prone to living in personal skyscrapers. According to Wikipedia, Bollygarchs “wield significant influence over the social and political agenda through big business and some philanthropic work. The name is believed to have been coined by the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs based in Chanakyapuri.”

And now we have the Ka-Ching! Dynasty – a term for the super-rich families and offspring of China’s government.

The Ka-Chings! moniker first popped up in The Washington Post more than six years ago. But lately it’s gained prominence in the Australian press and beyond, describing a Chinese elite that is increasingly dynastic (i.e. sons, daughters and relatives of government officials) and increasingly flashy.

“The echelon of China’s business elite seem to be dreaming bigger and planning their own personal versions of global domination,” announced a series on Australian Broadcastiong Corp.’s “Foreign Correspondent” program.

The show said that within 10 years, half of the world’s billionaires will come from China – a bold claim given that China has currently only has 5% of the world’s millionaires.

Still, the developing-country rich are clearly not only changing the economics of wealth but also the language.

What other terms have you heard for the rich of Russia, Brazil, India or China?

The notion that the rich just got richer in the recession continues to gather steam in the media. But the data increasingly shows us something different: Many fortunes crashed, and not all of them came back.

The latest proof of our age of “manic wealth” comes from California. According to data just released from the California Taxpayers Association, the number of Californians earning $500,000 or more fell by nearly a third between 2007 and 2009.

Alas, 2009 is the latest year available. And the fortunes of some those earners no doubt recovered or were replaced by new top earners, like the social-media millionaires.

Yet the number of $500,000-plus earners fell by more than many had projected at the start of the recession, shrinking to 98,610 from 146,221 in 2007.

What caused the drop. According to the Sacramento Bee, “Economists believe that most of the decline reflects lower incomes, rather than an exodus of high-income taxpayers from the state, but there are no hard data on that point.” The article states that incomes of the top one-percenters “declined the most of any income class.”

Feel free to shed a tear (or not) for these fallen high-earners. But the decline in top earners is important because they pay such a huge portion of taxes in California. When their incomes drop, so do their income tax payments. And those declines are the main reason for California’s budget hole.

In 2007, the top 1% of California earners paid about half of the states’s income taxes. Now it’s around 37%.

Do you think the incomes of the top earners in California have come back to 2007 levels?

It’s leaders and businesspeople are constantly grappling with how to maintain the town’s natural beauty and culture while also accommodating an ever-richer breed of resident. The mansions get bigger, the luxury stores more numerous and the Escalades and Land Rovers more ubiquitous. The median home price now tops $6 million – and many of those owners are only in Aspen three or four weeks a year.

And now Aspen’s culture wars are coming to a head with a new real-estate development. And “The High Beta Rich” — which chronicles some of Aspen’s class struggles — is fueling debate on both sides.

The dispute centers around a real-estate development downtown. To over-simplify, a developer planned to tear down two historic buildings to build a new 31,000 square-foot building that would included the largest new penthouse in Aspen, at 7,000 square feet. Some town residents and leaders balked. The developer agreed to preserve the buildings only if the town exempted him more than $4 million in fees.

Aspen’s mayor, Mick Ireland, labeled the proposal “blackmail” and called the developer an “extortionist.” In a letter to the Aspen Daily News, the mayor cited “The High Beta Rich,” saying the development would only increase Aspen’s already dangerous dependence on the increasingly manic and transient super-wealthy.

“Aspen can ill afford to see its downtown economic engine converted into a speculative venue for the excesses of an increasingly volatile finance-driven economy,” he wrote.

In response, Aspen Times columnist Charlie Leonard wrote that the mayor’s “blackmailer” comment was “unbecoming a mature adult.” And he had a different view of “The High Beta Rich,” which I respond to here.

Whether “The High Beta Rich” inspired the mayor’s view or not (and I haven’t spoken with him about the issue), Mayor Ireland is one of the few town leaders in the U.S. who seems to grasp the deeper economic forces that are changing wealth in America and making wealth less stable. If the governors of New York and California were as well versed on the rich, maybe they wouldn’t have such frequent revenue crises.

I don’t support or oppose the Aspen condo development. But Mayor Ireland is spot on when he writes that “We cannot reform the national economy but we can dampen some of the excess” through zoning. “Sunnier streets and small-town feel are not recession proof but offer our best opportunity to sustain Aspen’s premier resort.”

What do you think rich towns like Aspen can do to better weather the ups and downs of today’s “High-Beta” wealth?

But the most widely repeated superlative about the Facebook IPO is that it will create “1,000 overnight millionaires.”

This is impossible to know, of course. But the phrase “1,000 millionaires” appears to have magical – if not factual — significance in Silicon Valley.

Tech IPO watchers might recall Google’s IPO in 2004. Press reports at the time said the IPO “created more than 1,000 paper millionaires,” including a chef and a masseuse. That statistic was often attributed to “estimates,” though it was never clear where those estimates came from.

With Facebook, the “1,000 millionaire” claim first showed up in a Reuters article in December. Reuters partly attributes the number to a former in-house recruiter for Facebook who says “there will be thousands of millionaires.” The thousand claim has been picked up around the world and used as gospel in many recent reports about the IPO.

If the 1,000 number is true, then every one of the company’s 700 employees as of the end of 2008, as well as hundreds of other employees and investors, have shares worth at least $1 million or more.

Reuters concedes that there is no precise data on how many shares are owned by how many employees. It notes that most of the gains will go to the co-founders and the big venture-capital investors. Reuters said that in 2009, an engineer with 15 years experience hired by Facebook could get options to buy 65,000 shares at $6 a share. After the 5-1 stock split in 2010, those shares would be worth $12 million at the expected valuation of $40 a share.

That was 2009, of course. And it was for a 15-year engineer. Press reports say Facebook has become far more stingy with stock in recent years. Managers hired last year were getting as little as 2,000 shares – giving them paper wealth of a measly $80,000.

What’s more, many of the paper millionaires won’t be able to do anything with that paper wealth until the middle of next year, when they can actually sell the stock. Until then, it’s just paper. And Facebook’s share price may or may not be worth $40 by the middle of 2013 (ask the Groupon guys).

Facebook will no doubt create a large amount of wealth for a single company. Employee-wise, it’s a small company. And its IPO is far from a “wave of wealth.” Even if it creates 3,000 new millionaires, those new millionaires would represent less than 0.5% of the millionaires in California alone. Put another way, there will be only one Facebook millionaire added for every 220 existing California millionaires.

One of the ideological triumphs of the Occupy movement was to convince America that Wall Street was the 1%, and the 1% was Wall Street.

Associated Press

It made for such a clean argument, and the perfect protest location. Taxpayers bailed out Wall Street, Occupiers pointed out. The bankers’ gain was America’s loss (also true). Since Wall Streeters are rich, it only follows that that the gains of the 1% over the past 30 years have also been at the expense of the rest of America.

Yet the idea that the 1% are mostly bankers is flat out wrong. The fact is, if the Occupiers wanted to protest the 1%, they would be better off showing up at their local hospital.

A recent chart in the New York Times showed that of all the occupations, the one with the largest share of one-percenters was physicians. Fully 27% of physicians are one-percenters. That compares with only 10% for “financial specialists.”

According to research by economists Jon Bakija, Bradley Heim and Adam Cole, medical professionals accounted for 16% of the 1% in 2005. “Professionals in finance” accounted for 14%.

In other words, doctors outnumber finance professionals in the 1% – both as a share of the occupation and their share of the total.

This doesn’t suit the Occupy movement, of course. Would the media or voters have sympathy for protestors hoisting placards reading: “Occupy Your Orthopedist” or “Unite Against Plastic Surgeons!”

The medical profession, certainly, has its share of corruption, fraud, greed and over-compensation — sometimes at the expense of taxpayers through Medicare and Medicaid. Most voters would agree that medical costs have soared far too high, often benefitting the doctors.

Yet using doctors to protest inequality would be a losing proposition. Bankers make for much better targets – even if they’re a smaller slice of the 1%.

Sweden is often held up as the model of an equitable economy. It’s the anti-plutonomy.

It has among the lowest – or the lowest by many measures – rate of inequality in the world. The “Swedish Model” is often held up by the left as a policy nirvana, with high taxes, generous social programs and low unemployment.

But a new bus tour is giving tourists a different view of Sweden. It’s called the “Upper-Class Safari” and it takes tourists through the “lower class” part of Stockholm and then to the wealthier suburbs. The Local, Sweden’s English-language newspaper, said the group running the tours wants visitors to know that Sweden isn’t the class-free paradise it’s made out to be.

The tour group calls on prospective sightseers to develop their “hate” of the class system.

But much of the hate seems to be coming from local Swedes. Some residents of Solsidan – the upscale neighborhood toured by the bus – have thrown eggs at the tour bus as it passes.

“It is sad that adults use their time and money to come out here and look,” one resident told the local paper. Another resident complained to the police citing invasion of privacy.

All of this is surprising for a country that’s famed for its lack of class tensions. And maybe it’s the wrong country for true “high-class safari.”

The idea is much better suited to the U.S. As I’ve written before, a “plutonomy” tour of the U.S. – with bus tours of the mean streets of Bridgeport followed by a mega-mansion tour of Round Hill Road in Greenwich, or West Palm and Palm Beach – could prove hugely popular in our current age of populism.

Would it be helpful to the national discourse? Probably not. At the same time, I don’t think they’d do any real harm. Voyeurism (on both the high and low ends) should not be confused with class warfare. And the billionaires of South Ocean Drive could always instruct their butlers to hurl eggs at the tour buses.

Davos is often criticized as a cabal of the global elite. But maybe it’s time they got some populist credit: Only 70 of the 2,500 attendees are actual billionaire. The rest are merely powerful or merely millionaires.

Reuters

George Soros speaks during a news conference in Davos.

According to an article by Matt Miller of Bloomberg, the U.S. is sending the largest contingent of billionaires, with 20. The roster includes hedge-funders Steve Cohen, Ray Dalio, and George Soros. India is sending 16 billionaires – nearly a third of the country’s total billionaire population. Russia is sending 12. There are so many billionaires attending that a social-networking company is using the occasion to launch a new “Facebook for world leaders” Indian-born businessman Vivek Ranadivé is introducing TopCom, “a private social network that combines Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, texting, and Skype.” Oh, and you have to be among the 200 richest people in the world to join. Yet the billionaires at Davos are mindful of the times. So they’re highlighting all the social good that can come of their Alpine pow-wow. It’s not about doing deals, partying with the powerful and expanding their networks and fortunes, they told Miller. It’s about trying to make the world a better place. Buffett-like, they say inequality is a real problem – even though they’re perceived as the cause and Davos is short on inequality discussions. “We have seen in 2011 what ignoring this aspect can result in,” Azim Premji, the Indian software tycoon, wrote to Miller. “If we don’t take cognizance of it and try to solve this problem, it can create a chaotic upheaval globally.” Soros was more dire. He told Newsweek that he’s predicting “riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.” Should be a fun party. Why do you think billionaires go to Davos?

As go the wealthy, so goes California (and New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and a host of other states).

Up to 40% of the personal-income tax collections for these states come from the one-percenters. And a rising share of the state’s revenues come from personal-income taxes.

That works great during boom times. In California, when all those newly minted tech millionaires and billionaires sell stock, the taxes pour from Silicon Valley into the coffers of Sacramento.

But during busts, the incomes of the rich fall more than the rest of the population’s – along with the revenue. The top one pecent of income earners have become the most unstable segment of the economy, making government revenues equally volatile. (For more on this, see chapter titled “What’s Wrong With California” in The High-Beta Rich.)

Given these statistics, you would think that states might be figuring out ways to smooth out these swings. But you’d be wrong.

California is actually making matters worse by relying even more on the most unreliable form of revenue from the rich: capital gains.

According to a report from Fitch, the ratings service, California’s reliance on investment gains is actually increasing. Fitch states that: “The governor’s temporary tax proposal would elevate the importance of capital gains in the state’s revenue structure and expose the state to greater revenue volatility.”

It added that “As a percentage of general fund revenues, tax on capital gains is forecast to rise to 9.1% ($8.6 billion) in fiscal 2012-13, up from 3% ($2.6 billion) in fiscal 2008-09 at the depth of the recession.”

Because no one can forecast stocks, the state has forecast that revenues between 2010 and the middle of 2013 “may be as much as $3.9 billion below the governor’s forecast target. “

Of course, they may end up way above the target too, if stocks soar.

The point is, California has been through two fiscal disasters rooted in the crashing incomes of the rich, and the next one is now assured to be even worse. California can do one of two things: broaden the tax base (which is conservative code for lowering taxes on the wealthy), or put the added revenues during boom times into one-time projects or a rainy day fund.

A new survey shows that millionaires have strong views on how to fix the U.S. economy. But they strongly disagree on the solutions.

The survey, from PNC Wealth Management, found that about one-third of the millionaire respondents say the best single idea to improve the economy is to “reduce taxes on individuals and businesses.”

Fully 40% said that if their taxes were increased, they would change their investment strategy. One in four said they would reduce their charitable giving.

In other words, the wealthy want lower taxes. If they get higher taxes, they say they’ll invest and give less.

Bloomberg

Warren Buffett

At the same time, fully 20% say the best solution is to raise taxes on wealthy individuals. Another 15% suggested reducing the costs of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. And 10% said the government should increase stimulus measures.

The split, no doubt, reflects the progressive “Buffett” strain of the wealthy, who agree that the wealthy should do more to help the nation. Previous surveys shown a similar partisan split among the wealthy.

Still, a majority of the millionaires (64%) said they “want to be left alone by politicians” to enjoy their wealth however they choose. Fully 80% said they view reinvestment as key to improving society.

Some would argue that government policy by millionaires is exactly what got the country into its current mess. And as for the threat of less giving and less investing, the wealthy are already giving less than they did in 2007, while their substantial investments in gold, overseas stocks and cash accounts aren’t exactly helping the recovery.

Still, both the 99 percenters and one-percenters might agree with one view from the millionaires: More than three quarters said the government “has serious flaws in how it’s working.”

In responding to Stewart’s question about inequality, the Senator said: “There is a lot of misinformation about the rich in this country. Fifty percent of the people in our country who are millionaires are millionaires for one year. We have this kind of revolving door, we don’t have a permanent class of millionaires in America like a lot of other countries.”

This idea of a revolving door of riches isn’t new, and it is certainly born out in the data. As I’ve written before, the “1%” – at least when it comes to income — is more like a five-star hotel than a fixed club, with newly rich people coming and going all the time.

Yet the 50% number sounded high to me, so I checked with the Senator’s office for the source.

According to Sen. DeMint’s office, the stat came a study done by the non-partisan Tax Policy Center. The Senator cites the Tax Policy Center in a report where he’s used the data before.

The Tax Policy Center said it’s never come up with such a number. But the right-leaning Tax Foundation has done a study on what it calls “millionaire recurrence,” and it came up with the stat cited by Senator DeMint.

There is an important caveat, however. Senator DeMint uses the term “millionaires.” Most economists, reporters and academics use the term “millionaire” to refer to someone having a net worth of a million or more.

Yet the Tax Foundation study he cites looks at tax filers who report income of $1 million or more. We’ll call them the million-plus earners – which is more accurate than “millionaires.”

The study found that between 1999 and 2007, half of million-plus earners made it into the million-plus club only one year. Just 6% made it all nine years. So the rate of churn among those making a million or more in any given year is indeed quite high.

Roberton Williams of the Tax Policy Center points out that many of these million-plus earners are people who experienced a one-time liquidity event, usually from selling a business or asset. They’re the personal finance equivalent of one-hit wonders — reporting a one-time gain from their sale then settling back into a comfortable life of, say , the top 10% or 20%.

The picture for true millionaires – those with a net worth of a million or more – would be quite different. Wealth is less variable than income. As Williams told me, “Once you’ve made the nut, chances are you’ll keep it.” Unless, of course, you’re a lottery winner, a High-Beta Rich person or a celebrity who speculates on mansions.

Senator DeMints point is broadly right – at least when it comes to income rather than wealth. But perhaps he could change his speeches to refer to “million-dollar earners” rather than millionaires.

A new Pew Research poll shows that the cultural battle between rich and poor is as fierce as ever.

Fully 66% of Americans believe there are “strong” or “very strong” conflicts between rich and poor in the U.S. That’s way up from 47% in 2009.

The rich-poor conflict now eclipses perceived conflicts over immigration. The poll found that 62% of respondents believed there was a strong conflict between immigrants and native-born Americans – less than the 66% for rich-poor.

What’s more, Americans remain highly skeptical of the way the rich in America get rich. According to the poll, 46% of respondents believe the wealthy got wealthy “because they were born with money or they knew the right people.”

Only 43% of Americans believe that “hard work, ambition or education” are the reasons the rich got rich.

Of course, these questions could have been phrased more precisely. Getting rich through an inheritance is very different from getting rich by making the right connections and relationships in life (clearly a part of any rich-person’s journey). They should be separated as wealth causes. A better question might have been: Do the rich get rich from producing something of value, or simply taking from the economy?

The numbers on how the rich got rich are about the same as they were in 2009, meaning that while class-warfare may be at an all-time high, Americans’ actual perceptions of the rich haven’t changed much.

Yet their opinions are still fairly negative, since more Americans believe the rich owe their fortunes to their parents or clubby social circles rather than hard work, ambition or education. This skeptical view is most pronounced among the young, or those between 18 and 34.

Republicans believe in the “hard work” path more than Democrats (their responses are almost mirror opposites). And men generally fall into the “hard work” camp more than women.

The results highlight just how conflicted Americans are about the rich. Most studies show that more than two-thirds of today’s millionaires made it themselves, rather than from inheritance. And clearly education and skills matter in making a fortune in the knowledge economy.

Yet the polls suggests that for many Americans, the rich form a self-preserving “club” that’s largely closed to the rest of us — whether it’s because of family background or exclusive networks. That view is exactly what Mitt Romney will have to battle in the coming elections.

How do you think the rich got rich? Hard work, education and ambition, or inheritance and connections?

The idea of a tax on wealth, as opposed to one on income, seems to be gaining popularity.

What began as a fiscal Hail Mary pass in Greece and Italy is now popping up in the U.S. In an insightful op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Ronald McKinnon argues for a tax of up to 3% on the wealth of those worth $3 million or more. “Because wealth will generally present a much larger tax base than income, tax rates can be kept low and still raise substantial revenue,” he writes.

Donald Trump once argued for a one-time levy of 14.25% on individuals with net worth in excess of $10 million.

Associated Press

On its face, a wealth tax could be highly lucrative. The richest 1% has more than $15 trillion in wealth. Proponents say that skimming a few percentage points from that wealth will barely be noticed by the rich but would make a huge dent in the deficit.

The wealth tax, however, has a fatal flaw: valuation. Determining a rich person’s precise net worth is difficult even for the wealthy themselves, let alone the government. And that’s due to the particular nature of the wealth of the wealthy.

According to the most recent data from the Federal Reserve, most of the wealth of the top 1% is in illiquid assets – i.e., stuff that can easily be valued or sold. Stocks, bonds and other financial assets account for about 38% of their wealth. That’s easy to value.

Yet the other 62% of the wealth of the top 1% is “non-financial” – i.e., vehicles, boats, real estate, and (most importantly) private business. Private businesses account for nearly 40% of their wealth and are the largest single category.

How do you value a private business? You don’t really, until it’s sold. Business owners could easily make their businesses look much less valuable that they really are, through accounting, valuations and assumptions about the future. This issue is common in wealthy divorces, where a husband downplays the value of his company to shield it from claims.

Even the rich don’t know what exactly what they’re worth in any given moment. As the publishing tycoon Felix Dennis once wrote: “It sounds crazy, but the richer you are and the more financial advisers you employ, the less the likelihood is that you can ever discover what you are really worth. It’s a nice problem to have, but it’s still a problem.”

Yes, the incomes of the rich can also be “managed.” But the rich have even more leeway in valuing private businesses — and don’t think they wouldn’t try to minimize their taxes.

That’s a problem for anyone who thinks a wealth tax would be realistically enforceable.

Do you think a wealth tax would work? If so, how would valuations be determined and enforced?

If you’re still licking your wounds from last year’s market performance, here’s a bit of consolation. The rich didn’t do that well either.

Everett Collection

According to a study from the Institute for Private Investors, the average return expected for 2011 for wealthy families was 4.9% — down from an average of 11.26% in 2010. The study, called the Family Performance Tracking survey, looks at families with investible assets of $30 million or more.

Granted, the wealthy beat the overall S&P, which is more than they could say in 2010. The S&P in 2011 increased just 2.1% inclusive of dividends. In 2010, the same families under-performed the S&P’s 13% return.

The big question is where wealthy investors are putting their money this year, since they have such an outsized impact on financial markets and asset classes.

Generally, the rich investors say they have a positive outlook, expecting the S&P to return an average of 6.4% in 2012. But their actual investing plans suggest a more dour outlook for the U.S.

Fully 44% plan to increase their holdings in global equities, which includes markets outside the U.S. That’d down from 64% last year.

The rich prefer commodities, real-estate, private companies and cash this year. Fully 48% plan to increase their allocation to commodities in 2012, and 45% of respondents to real estate. Only 36% plan to decrease their cash holdings.

More than half of the families hope to increase direct investments in private companies, and they’re “increasingly bullish on tangible assets such as gold, land and artwork,” the study said.

“The common refrain we’re hearing from investors this year is that they’re decreasing their exposure to public markets and relying less on financial instruments and trading strategies,” said Charlotte Beyer, IPI founder and CEO. “Many investors are continuing to position themselves defensively.”

The study is another sign that for the rich, wealth preservation is taking priority over wealth creation.

The map of the world’s billionaires has been shifting East for years. But now that may be changing.

Bloomberg News

According to a new study, the number of billionaires in India dropped by more than 30% in 2011. Press reports blamed the drop on the country’s stock market, which fell by 40% last year.

According to the data from ET Intelligence Group, India now has about 40 billionaires, down from 60 in 2010.

Among the drop-outs, according to The Economic Times, were RPG Group’s HV Goenka; Lanco Group’s LM Rao; the Dhoot brothers of Videocon; GTL’s Manoj Tirodkar; and Tulsi Tanti of Suzlon.

Even the survivors got less rich. Virtually all of the top 10 richest Indians saw their fortunes shrink last year. The combined wealth of the top 10 dropped by nearly half, to $19.15 billion from $34.8 billion.

Of course, billionaire rankings can sometimes be guesses, since it’s hard to know the exact value of every asset and liability of a billionaire. But the data suggests that High-Beta Wealth – ie volatile fortunes dependent on the stock market – is now hitting the shores of developing countries.

The question is whether we’ll see the same drops in China, Brazil or Russia, which have all seen their stock markets decline. Clearly, China’s growth is slowing; Russia is facing increasing political turmoil; and Brazil’s economy has been driven in large part by natural-resource demand from China. All of which may mean that the BRICs may lose some of their billionaire luster.

About The Wealth Report

The Wealth Report is a daily blog focused on the culture and economy of the wealthy. It is written by Robert Frank, a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal and author of the newly released book “THE HIGH-BETA RICH.”

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